


Let Me In

by Flyting



Category: Låt den rätte komma in | Let the Right One In (2008), Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Bullying, Let the Right One In AU, M/M, Vampires, Young Love, child vampires, vampire!Kylo
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-20
Updated: 2017-02-20
Packaged: 2018-09-25 22:27:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9849179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flyting/pseuds/Flyting
Summary: Twelve year old Armitage Hux lives in a council flat with his mother after his parents' divorce.  His classmates call him 'smarmy army'. He hates them.That is, until Armitage becomes best friends with the strange boy who lives next door. The one who only comes out at night.A KyluxLet The Right One InAU.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Spot the John Lindqvist quote and win a prize.

Skinny, twelve-year-old Armitage Hux, lives with his mother in a council flat.

 

The boys at school call him Army. _Smarmy Army. Barmy Army. Smarmy little Army warmy._ He hates them.

 

Armitage thinks that if he were better, he weren’t so  _useless_ , his father wouldn’t have left them. His father was a soldier, an officer with broad shoulders and buzz-cut hair, and iron in his blood and in his muscles. Armitage is small and weak, with arms like macaroni noodles. A disappointment.

 

He is bullied at school for his small size. For being too smart, too  _weird_. Because he reads books about murderers and dictators because they’re _fascinating_  and he wishes he had power like them. When Stalin was at the height of his power all he had to do was say a few words and whoever had offended him was gone, vanished, like they never existed. They even cut them out of pictures so Stalin would never have to be reminded of them again.

 

His classmates groan and roll their eyes when the teacher calls on him in class and the answer reminds him of something that Pol Pot did, and he says so. _Why are you so weird?_ One girl whines. The teacher doesn’t correct her and Armitage sits down with his cheeks as red as his hair.

 

He gets the ginger jokes too. _Hey what’s the difference between a ginger and a vampire? One’s a pale soulless creature that avoids the sun, and the other is a vampire. Stolen any souls yet today, Army? Uh-oh, the sun’s out, better get Smarmy Army some sunblock._

Funny.

 

 _Well if you put on a little muscle, they wouldn’t be able to do that,_  his father says on the phone when Armitage calls him-  _not to cry don’t cry_ \- to talk about how some boys at school had tripped him and shoved him into a gym locker. The next time he calls his father, he doesn’t talk about the bad things. Just about his grades – all A’s- and about how he helped mum clean the apartment last weekend, and about how much he hopes he can come and visit this summer. If all he talks about is how good he’s been, maybe this year his father will say yes.

 

At home when he isn’t reading or watching tv, he is imagining what he would do if he were powerful. What he’d do to his parents, his neighbors, the people at school who make fun of him. The fantasies are detailed. He has a lot of time on his hands, that he otherwise just spends watching the neighbors from his bedroom window.

 

When one of the boys at school kicks his backpack down the hall, spilling his library books – _An Encyclopedia of Serial Killers_ and _Hitler’s Rise to Power_ were from the big library down the block, he had walked there after school specifically to get them- all down the hall, nobody offered to help him pick them up. A couple of people laughed.

 

That night he goes home and takes a little cheese knife out of the kitchen drawer and he cuts their faces out of his school photo. Gone, like they never existed. It makes him feel better, a little.

 

The boy who moves in next door is very strange.

 

For starters, he has greasy dark hair and looks like he never showers. He’s pale and skinny, with a big nose and big ears, and he never says a word. When he moved in, in the middle of a freezing winter night, he left bare footprints in the snow all the way up to the door. Armitage, looking out of his bedroom window, had watched them until the snow filled them in.

 

Armitage wonders what his name is.

 

The boy next door lives with an old man who might be his grandfather, and who watches Armitage sometimes in a way that gives him the creeps. The old man has jagged scars, like claw marks on his face and neck. His teeth are yellowed and crooked, and one eye is a rheumy white. Armitage has nightmares about that eye staring at him from dark corners of his bedroom and wakes up sweaty, his heart fluttering rabbit-fast in his skinny chest.

 

Armitage thinks the boy next door is being abused. He never comes out of the flat. Sometimes when Armitage presses his ear against the drywall, he hears shouting in a deep voice –  _useless! do I have to do it myself?-_  and banging like something being thrown into the wall coming from next door. The creepy old man hurries out the door soon after, and everything goes quiet.

 

Just before Christmas, Armitage gets the best present he could have hoped for. There is a murderer in their town. A boy from the university is killed. And a jogger. Armitage cuts all of the articles out of the newspaper and sticks them on the wall over his bed. The victims were cut and stabbed so many times they were almost completely drained of blood. Armitage tries to imagine standing over someone – a teacher, the old man next door, one of the boys from school who called him _army warmy_ \- and watching all their blood pour out. He wonders how long it would take and if they would be awake the whole time and you could talk to them. If they knew, in their last moments, just who was killing them.

 

The boy next door only comes out at night. He sits in the courtyard by himself and looks at the stars. Eventually Armitage musters up the nerve to sneak down to the courtyard and talk to him. It’s easy. His mum is passed out on the couch with a glass by her hand, the telly playing old reruns of some late night show.

He pads across the dirty snow, tromped flat and muddy by hundreds of feet, and sits next to the boy on a bench.

“What’s your name?”  
  
The boy watches him. He has dark eyes, like his hair, like the night sky above them. “Kylo.”  
  
“Hi, Kylo. I’m Armitage. I live next door to you.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
“Oh.”

Kylo is wearing shorts and a faded Star Wars t-shirt that looks like they came from the thrift store. Armitage plays with the sleeve of his puffy down jacket. “Aren’t you cold?”

“No.”  
  
They sit in silence for a long time. “Just so you know, I can't be your friend,” Kylo says.  
  
“Why not?”  
  
“That's just the way it is.”   
  
“Well, who said I wanted to be your friend? Idiot.” Armitage storms inside and slams his bedroom door, waking his mother up. When he looks out the window, Kylo is gone.

 

But Kylo does become his friend, somehow, despite his insistence to the contrary.

Most nights he is sitting alone on the bench outside their adjoining flats. Armitage brings him presents- books, puzzles, little games, like the kind you take on car trips. Kylo looks at them like he has no idea what they are, turning them over in his hands with a little frown between his dark eyebrows, but he likes them, Armitage can tell by the way his eyes light up, and by the way he sits there and listens to Armitage talk while he plays with them. 

“And Jeffrey Dahmer, he was an American serial killer,” Armitage says, holding open his library book. Kylo has an American accent, so he might think this is cool.

“They said he killed people because he didn’t want them to leave him. He cut them up and kept parts of them in his house. He kept big barrels of acid around to destroy evidence, and so nobody could identify the bodies.”

“That’s not a good reason to kill people,” Kylo says without looking up from his puzzle. He doesn’t sound grossed out. The little pieces of metal clink together as he twists them around trying to unstick them. “If someone is dead, they’re gone. Forever.”

But Armitage is thinking about the first thing Kylo said. “What do you think is a good reason to kill people?”

Kylo shrugs. “Because you want them gone. Or because you have to, because… there’s no other choice.”

Armitage nods, because this makes sense. He wonders why the murderer in their town is killing people.

 

With the body count now up to five, the police put a curfew on the town. Armitage’s mother expects him to hurry straight home from school, although a lot of times she doesn’t check. Without his library books, he spends more time talking to Kylo.

 

“Why don’t you go to school?” he asks. “Are you homeschooled?” Kylo looks his age. They live in the same block of flats. He should have seen Kylo at school.

Armitage wishes Kylo went to his school. It would be nice to have somebody to talk to during the day. They could sit together at lunch.

“What’s that?”

“It’s where you get taught at home. By your parents or whoever.”

“Oh. Yeah, I guess that.”

 

When Armitage comments on his appearance- _you’re a little gross, you know that-_  Kylo starts showering more. His hair looks soft and wavy when it’s clean, and snow lands in it like stars. He wears clothes that fit the weather instead of sitting in the snow in bare feet and bare arms, like he doesn’t feel the cold. Sometimes he sits by Armitage on the bench and listens to him talk, even when Armitage doesn’t bring him anything to play with.

 

Another murder. Another newspaper clipping.

 

The day that Orson from school shoves Armitage down as they’re walking home- _watch it smarmy army-_ and he splits his lip on the pavement, Armitage doesn’t go outside. He lays in his bed and sniffles – _cowardweakuseless –_ because his ribs and between his legs hurt where Orson’s friends had kicked him as he lay on the pavement. A huge nebula bruise has blossomed over his chest when he pulls up his shirt.

At some point his mother knocks on the door asking him to come eat dinner, reheated beans on toast like usual, but he ignores her until she goes away and then he cries some more. He wants to call his father, but he knows what his father would say.

A soft _tat tat tat tat tat_ pulls him out of his own misery.

Something is tapping on his window.

“Invite me in,” Kylo says, clinging to the sill.

“What?  
  
“You have to invite me in.”

 “Kylo- okay, come in, quick! What are you doing? Why are you-? How did you even get up here?” He lives on the second floor! Kylo ignores the hail of shrill questions as he clambers easily in Armitage’s window. He has a lissome kind of grace that reminds Armitage more of a cat than a boy.

“I climbed. You didn’t come outside.” Something almost like a smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. It falls when his dark eyes find Armitage’s face, with his split lip and scratched cheek.

“What happened?”  
  
His voice is low. It sounds… dangerous.

“Just… some boys from school.”

Kylo is staring hard at Armitage’s mouth, biting his own plush lip in the place where his is split.

“You have to fight back. If they do this again, you have to fight back.”

“They’re bigger than me."

“Then you hit them even harder.”

He tries to picture punching Jimmy or Bernard or Orson right in the face. It’s a nice fantasy. Like being powerful.

“And what about when that doesn’t work?” he asks, crashing back down to earth.

That enigmatic not-quite smile returns. “Then I’ll help you.”

He feels the ghost of something brushing his scratched cheek and realizes it’s Kylo’s thumb. The thought makes warmth blossom through his bruised chest.

 

Later, Armitage pads out into the living room. Once he’s sure that his mum is passed out on the couch again, he sticks his beans and toast in the microwave. It makes it soggy, but he’s hungry enough not to care.

When he returns, Kylo is sitting on his bed, scuffing his bare feet on the worn hardwood floor, and the sight of him makes him warm and anxious again. It feels like something is scrabbling in the pit of his stomach trying to escape.

Armitage sits next to him and crunches into his reheated dinner. He doesn’t bother to offer Kylo any. One time he had urged Kylo to try a piece of his chocolate candy – _it’s good, I promise-_ and Kylo had finally given in, only to throw it up right after. Armitage figures he has food allergies or something. Just another way Kylo was weird.

He likes that Kylo is weird, because he’s weird too. He’d rather not be weird alone.

Weird or not, Kylo is his best friend. After he’s eaten and put the plate on the nightstand, Armitage sticks a DVD in the little portable DVD player his father had given him for his birthday.

“What’s this?” Kylo asks, blinking in the artificial light from the telly.

“It’s Star Wars. Return of the Jedi.”

“What’s that?”

“How have you never seen Star Wars?” Armitage explodes, voice going shrill, remembering only halfway through his sentence not to be too loud, in the off-chance his mother woke up.

Kylo was wearing an old Star Wars t-shirt the first time Armitage ever talked to him.

“I don’t watch a lot of… these.”

Armitage gives him a quick run-down of the first two movies before the opening scroll starts. Kylo watches his face, close and serious, just the way he does when Armitage is talking about school or serial killers or his favorite books.

Before they get to Endor he’s asleep, Kylo lying close beside him on top of the covers. Kylo smells like soap and cheap shampoo, and under that like something sour.

 

A whisper. It’s late, the movie long over.

“Armitage?”

Kylo _never_ calls him Army _._

“Hmm?”

“Do you like me?”

“Mmm-hmmm.”  
  
Sometimes, late at night, he thinks he might like Kylo as more than a best friend, but he doesn’t know how to tell him that.  
  
“Would you like me even if I wasn’t a boy?”  
  
“What do you mean? Yes, of course. Why?”

A swallow in the dark. “No reason. Go back to sleep.”  
  
  
  
When he wakes up, sunlight is streaming through the open window and Kylo is gone. Smiling, still half-asleep, he reaches up with one arm and knocks- _one two three_ \- on the wall of his bedroom. The one that adjoins Kylo’s. 

After a moment, Kylo knocks back. _Knock knock knock._

Armitage smiles all through school that day. It’s like Kylo has left a sun inside of him, warming him from within.

Two more killings. Two more articles pinned to his wall. Kylo frowns at them when he visits, but says nothing.  
  
“This says they found traces of chloroform in all the victims’ bodies,” he explains to Kylo as he clips the second article. “Which explains how he’s getting them out in the middle of nowhere. Probably grabs them and drugs them, and then takes them somewhere else to kill them.”  
  
“Yes, probably,” Kylo agrees, distantly, and then changes the subject. Kylo does not mind when Armitage talks about other serial killers, or about Stalin or Pol Pot or the Spanish Inquisition, but he does not like it when Armitage talks about their local murders. Maybe he is scared, although it’s hard to imagine Kylo being afraid of anything. There’s something about him, a kind of distant grace. Like nothing around him really touches him. Armitage thinks it’s lovely. Like he’s some fairy tale prince.

 

“Dad, can I ask you something _?”_ Armitage sits on the floor while his mum cooks dinner, twirling the cord on the old wall phone around his fingers. _Would you be mad if I had a boyfriend- would it be okay if there was this boy- would you hate me if-_  
  
“If you spit it out, lad.”

“There’s- if I- can I come visit this weekend?” he deflates at the last minute. _Coward, weak, useless_. His father says no, as usual.

 

He asks Kylo if he wants to go steady anyway. They are lying in Armitage’s bed again. Kylo’s cold hands are pressed flat against his belly. _You’re warm,_ he’d said, with a sideways half-moon of a smile. Kylo is always cold, even inside.

“What’s that mean?”

“Like, be… boyfriends.”

 There is something hunted in Kylo. Like he’s a wild thing, and his ears are constantly perked for the approaching hunters.

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”  
  
“Oh.”

He squirms under Kylo’s cold hands.

“Armitage, I’m not a boy.”

“What are you, then?”  
  
“I’m nothing.”

He sounds so serious that Armitage doesn't laugh, even though the statement was a little ridiculous. The term _old soul_ comes to mind, and he finally understands it.

“If you just don’t like me,” he swallows, “ _that_ way it’s okay, you don’t have to make things up, Kylo. Just say you don’t want to be my- my boyfriend.”

“I didn’t say I don’t want to.” The back of a finger brushes gently against his belly, and Armitage’s breath catches. “It’s just not a good idea. Can we just keep things the way they are?”

“Yeah, okay.”  
  
  


_I didn’t say I don’t want to._

_I didn’t say I don’t want to. I didn’t say I don’t want to. I didn’t say I don’t want to._

In his head, Armitage still sort-of thinks of Kylo as his boyfriend. _I have a boyfriend._ When a girl in class sniggers at his history presentation on the Stalinist Purges, he thinks _I have a boyfriend._ When Jimmy knocks his clothes on the wet ground in the gym showers, _I have a boyfriend._

It cannot last. Things start to go wrong in little pieces, components failing one by one. On a class trip, Orson comes at him again, and Kylo’s words are rattling around in his head. Armitage hits him, harder than he thought he could, harder than he _should,_ and then Orson is on the ground bleeding, crying, a gash on his cheek and splitting his ear from the thin tree branch Armitage had swung at his face. Blood leaks down his neck, thick and steady, and it does not make Armitage feel powerful. He feels sick, like he might throw up.

He is sent home. His mother has to sit through a meeting. She cries, wondering where she went wrong, and he sits there beside her, too small for the chair he’s been given, feeling curiously distant from his guilt. He isn’t sorry. Not for her. Not for Orson.

 

Later, he sees Kylo’s guardian- _he’s not my father-_ in the halls, carrying an armful of empty milk jugs. He watches Armitage with his one good eye the entire time they are in the hall together. It’s almost threatening.

 _Don’t mind him, he can’t hurt you,_ Kylo says when they are together.

 

That night there is another attempted murder. A woman who lived just a few blocks away. It was a close thing, according to the news. A man grabbed her from behind and tried to cover her mouth with a rag, but her boyfriend scared him off.

 

The screaming and pounding, which had been quiet for months now, starts up in Kylo’s flat again. Angry, muffled voices in the night. _Idiot! Do I have to do everything myself?_ A door slamming. Armitage lies awake until the sun comes up.

On the news the next day, it says their local killer has been captured. He’s being kept in hospital after pouring acid on his own face to avoid identification.  
  
  
  


“You should have been there-“ he tells Kylo, breathless, the next time he sees him. “There were three of them, I thought they were going to _kill me_ , but as soon as I hit him the others backed off-”

“I’m proud of you,” Kylo smiles a little. He smiles more now, Armitage has noticed, than when they first met, although he has gotten thinner in the past few weeks. “You’re much stronger than you think you are.”

They are hanging out in the little storage area in the basement, sitting on a dusty old couch that creaked when they moved. There is an old radio that still works in the shed, and they had danced, awkward and giggling at each other, to some old music, before settling on the couch. Armitage had stolen two cans of soda out of his fridge for them to enjoy, but Kylo hasn’t touched the second one.

  
“I never would have done it without you. All I could think was _what would you do_ and I just swung and _thwap-“_ he makes the sound effect while he mimes swinging the branch. “He went down hard. It bled so much he had to go to hospital.”  
  
“Serves him right.”

“And, I had an idea-“ Armitage produces a little pocket knife from his jacket. His father had left it when he moved out. He has been thinking about this for weeks, and only now, in his jubilation, has he mustered up the nerve to broach the issue. “Do you know what it means to be blood brothers?”  
  
“No,” Kylo frowns. Armitage loves his frown, loves the way it makes a little crease between his eyebrows.  
  
“It’s a little like… being married. But better, because we’ll always be a part of each other.”

“Why would you want that?” Kylo’s voice is barely above a whisper.

“Because you’re the best and the coolest person I’ve ever met, and I… without you I would have just let them push me around, and- and hurt me. Because you make me stronger.” _Because I love you,_ he doesn’t say.

He is frozen in place when Kylo leans in, quickly, like he is afraid of being caught, even though it’s only the two of them in here, and pecks him on the cheek.

“What do we have to do?”

“I’m going to just prick my finger a little here,” Armitage grunts a little as he does so, “Just a little, so it bleeds, and we’ll do you-“

Kylo leaps away from Armitage’s reaching hand like he’s been scalded. He scrambles backwards, bare feet sliding on the dusty floor, his eyes wide and white in the darkness. “No-“

“It’s okay, it doesn’t even hurt,” he holds up his finger to show the fat droplet of blood dripping down it. “The knife’s really sharp and it’s just a tiny cut-”

It all happens so quickly after that. Kylo groans, suddenly clutching at his stomach, and then whines. Then he is on his knees and Armitage can hear his stomach growing, like he’s _starving_ , and hunched over like that in the dust, Kylo reminds him of some half-wild _thing._ He crouches and shuffles like an animal, backing into the darkest corner of the room, where his eyes reflect the light like a cat’s.

“Get out _,”_ he growls, and it is a growl, low and full of hanging menace. He pants and whines again, the sound like an animal in pain.

“Kylo? What- what’s wrong?” He reaches out, tentative, with one hand, his bloodied hand, and it is the wrong thing to do, because his friend- _his boyfriend_ \- snarls again, and there was something in that sound that was… pure horror. Everything you were supposed to be afraid of. Heights, fire, shards of glass, snakes, everything that his parents tried so hard to keep him safe from. Armitage stumbled back, landing on his arse on the couch and pulling his knees up to his chest.

“ _Get out!”_

The only parts of Kylo that were visible in the darkness were the points of his bared teeth, and the dull gleam of his eyes. Armitage feels hypnotized, too scared to move, and then suddenly Kylo is rushing at him on hands and bent legs. He holds out the pocket knife with one hand in a feeble last stab at self-defense, the other arm covering his eyes. A soft rush of air passes by his head and then there’s a huffing, animal noise from the stairs as something scrabbles up them on all fours and the sharp slam of the door.

The pocket knife clatters to the floor as Armitage puts both arms over his head and cries.


End file.
